The present disclosure generally relates to augmented reality systems or virtual reality systems and more specifically relates to headsets for virtual or augmented reality systems that obtain depth information of a local area.
Virtual reality (VR) systems, which may include augmented reality (AR) systems, can leverage the capture of the environment surrounding a user in three dimensions (3D). However, traditional depth camera imaging architectures are comparably large, heavy, and consume significant amounts of power. For example, time-of-flight (both direct-detect pulses and encoded waveforms), structured light (SL), and stereo vision are commonly used camera architectures for obtaining 3D information of a scene. Within SL architectures, asymmetrical camera design having a single camera and single SL source with a known baseline distance is a commonly used framework for capturing 3D scene information. In an asymmetrical camera design, 3D information for a scene is provided by a mapping of a structured light pattern into the overlapping camera field-of-view. However, measurement results of a SL design are impacted by having an in-band background light level in the local area being imaged. For example, in cases where a brightness of background light of a local area spans multiple orders of magnitude (equal to or brighter than an apparent intensity of the SL source), a SL solution degrades (as the signal of interest is eventually lost in a photon-noise limit of the source of the background light). Time-of-flight (ToF) architectures experience similar performance degradation under increasing ambient brightness. However, without at least minimum background brightness through a controlled or uncontrolled ambient source, stereo vision is unable to capture 3D scene information.